A place of retreat for this mother of seven (currently fighting Stage IV Metastatic Breast Cancer) to speak on the joys and challenges of life for a Catholic family immersed in American culture.

Wednesday, March 03, 2010

Bad Parenting 101

Here is a list of what NOT to do in order to teach your children responsibility and natural consequences of their actions...

1. Should your child, who generally finishes his homework at school, get in the bad habit of leaving his backpack in the car overnight, do not let this continue uncorrected.

2. If, against your better judgement, you HAVE allowed this to continue, and you happen to pick up this same child in your husband's car one day, most definitely DO NOT allow him to leave his backpack in the car, as there is no telling where it might go with your husband (even if your husband's daily routine is unfailingly predictable).

3. If you have completely failed at executing numbers one and two, and your child finds himself without a backpack as you are leaving to take him to school at 7am, absolutely, positively, DO NOT allow him to talk you into driving like a lunatic across town to the church where your husband's car is parked in order to grab his backpack and eventually deliver him to school, unscathed and with virtually no consequences to his irresponsibility other than, of course, your own highly elevated stress level.

4. Most of all, avoid number three if your ever-patient and long-suffering neighbor is waiting for you to be home precisely on time so she can leave with the remainder of the children who need to be delivered to an entirely different school, because doing so might cause a domino effect and cause her completely innocent carful of children to be late due to your son's error. Because even if they weren't actually late, they COULD have been.

There you have it. What not to do. Not that I would know all this from experience or anything...

Ok - how about the mother who makes her children take off their shoes before they come into the house but fails to check if they are wearing them upon leaving the house? Said mother then proceeds to bring their child to school THREE times in one school year without shoes!!! Unnamed mother also has to drop these children off by 7:45am in order to make it to a class of her own by 7:55am! All I can say is thank you Suzanne for carrying extra shoes in your car even if they were slide on sandals that are so against dress code! :)